19 of the World’s Coolest Airbnb Properties, Transformed Into Birdhouses

Artists studied the originals, in some cases visiting them, to make the birdhouses as accurate as possible. This Lake Tahoe ski chalet has a mini hot tub out back. Image: Airbnb

Note the patio furniture at this cottage near Laugarvatn, Iceland. Image: Airbnb

The team looked for homes that were architecturally interesting and geographically diverse. Image: Airbnb

A Diwa Cottage in Pampanga, Philippines. Image: Airbnb

Though they included a lot of off-beat homes, they also wanted to showcase some of the service's cozier listings. Image: Airbnb

The Owl House in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Image: Airbnb

A cozy wooden retreat in Michigan City, Indiana. Image: Airbnb

The Journey to the Center of the Earth house in Hellnar, Iceland. Image: Airbnb

The Mushroom Dome in Aptos, California. Image: Airbnb

The River Song Cottage, Austin, Texas. Image: Airbnb

A tower house in Bend, Oregon. Image: Airbnb

A Silo Studio Cottage in Berkshires, Massachusetts. Image: Airbnb

You can rent a 15th century Feudal castle in Cashel Ireland. Image: Airbnb

High Desert Eden in Pioneertown, California. Image: Airbnb

The Dome Home in Koh Samui, Thailand. Image: Airbnb

Thatched Cottage, Durweston, UK. Image: Airbnb

A lighthouse in York County, Pennsylvania. Image: Airbnb

In the five years Airbnb has existed, it’s grown from a little bedroom startup to a service that’s hosted more than 10 million guests in 550,000 properties worldwide. All this without a real, hard-push advertising campaign. The company, started in San Francisco in 2008, made the most of its internet roots; using word of mouth, social media and low-caliber advertising to grow its reach so far. But it has bigger ambitions than that: “We want to become a household name,” says Amy Curtis-Mclntyre, VP of Marketing at Airbnb, “and be understood as the most interesting hospitality company in the world.”

The miniature houses have been hanging in Audubon Park, filled with birdseed.

That’s a pretty big goal for a still relatively-small company, which is why Airbnb decided to roll out its first big advertising campaign. Called “Birdbnb,” the new campaign features a long-format commercial that documents the process of turning 50 of the company’s most interesting properties into intricately handcrafted birdhouses. For the past few days, the miniature houses have been hanging in New Orleans’s Audubon Park filled with birdseed.

The idea may seem quaint—tiny birdhouses!—but it was actually a huge undertaking on the part of Airbnb and its agency Pereira & O’Dell. At the beginning of the process, Curtis-Mclntyre went to CEO Brian Chesky to get a feel for what he had in mind. “He told me, ‘We’re not like any other company in the world, so we can’t market like any other company in the world,'” she says.

Curtis-Mclntyre tapped the Pereira & O’Dell creative team to start brainstorming ideas. “The first thing that jumps out is how interesting and unique the places you can stay are,” says Jaime Robinson, Executive Creative Director at Pereira & O’Dell. “It’s pretty much the opposite of a hotel.” The key was to figure out how to get to the heart of Airbnb’s charm—the fact that it’s essentially a giant network of homes, each with its own distinct personality and offerings.

“That’s when they started to think about the travelers themselves.“Birds are the ultimate travelers, they go from one place to the other, they migrate,” explains Robinson. “We thought that wouldn’t it be lovely to show that process of artists creating these really intricate birdhouses?”

The team pored over thousands of potential properties, looking for those that would best translate to miniature. The homes needed to be geographically diverse since Airbnb is an international company. They also needed to be architecturally interesting. They whittled the selection down to 50 with the help of Chesky. “Brian has a really really strong pov about arch and design,” Curtis-Mclntyre says of the RISD graduate—and sent them to the artists.

Artists measuring a home in Joshua Tree. Each birdhouse is an exact replica—or as close as possible—to the original house. Image: Airbnb

The 50 houses were handcrafted by a team of five artists, who fined tuned every detail. There’s a restored sheep wagon from Casper, Wyo., a ski chalet in Lake Tahoe, Calif., complete with a miniature hot tub out back; the Tile, Mosaic House in Joshua Tree, which features an exact replica of the multi-colored home, down to the number of rainbow-colored strips on the outside, and a converted water tower in London.

Not all of Airbnb’s offerings are quite so distinct—the site has its share of mediocrely-designed spaces up for rent, too—but the whole point of the campaign was to show that the service has grown beyond glorified couch surfing to a viable, preferable alternative to more traditional lodging. “This campaign says good design really matters. It’s a testimony to investing in quality,” she says. “We always want to serve the traveler who just needs a place to crash, but we wanted to take ownership of the design narrative.”